Visiting Robin Metz
I’ve recently returned from visiting Robin Metz who has been my wise man since I met him nearly 50 years ago and because he was that immediately for me, a man of many wisdoms, I have often overlooked that Robin also happens to be the coolest dude ever; since it’s easier to illustrate the latter, get this: Robin Metz played football while earning his undergraduate degree at Princeton then returned home to work in the Pittsburgh steel mills for the summer before he headed to Iowa to earn his MFA at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop then came to teach at Knox College at age 25 in 1967 where he led the creation of one of the most respected undergrad Creative Writing programs in the country and where he teaches to this day and while teaching founded the Vitalist Theater in Chicago partnering with his wife Liz and a few years back was invited to read poetry in the Himalayas from his Ranier Maria Rilke International Poetry Prize winning work. Sweet.
I visited Robin because he was told he doesn’t have much longer to live.
He is on his farm, outside Ferryville, Wisconsin, a Mississippi River town. I flew into Milwaukee and drove across the state with my brother Erik; just a few days before our journey that part of Southwest Wisconsin had suffered their third ‘100 Year Flood’ in the past 15 years and our trip was a maze of road closings and bridges awash with overflow. But we made it—thank you Erik—and Robin and Liz and I spent a couple of hours in his living room.
And it was a living room, filled with good life. The glass doors and floor to ceiling windows were all open to Buck Creek valley and forest and the breezes that kept his Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags flapping played rolling symphonies with the half dozen wind chimes hanging from posts and eaves just outside on the deck.
Robin and Liz quickly filled me in on his condition—how unfair, how terribly unfair, to be battling a painful case of the shingles at the same time cancer is killing him (my indignation here, not Robin’s)—and then Robin anticipated my questions as he spoke of the gift of fully appreciating the value of each passing minute. “I wake up and I am so happy I am alive.” I’m not sure if he spoke it or if it was in the sparkle of his eyes.
His greatest sadness is for those he’ll leave who love him; he has suffered that deep down despair that comes from losing the love at your center. But he celebrates poetry for its powers, many restorative; he was reading from his book of grief poems, Unbidden Angel, when in Nepal.
And his certainty that energy simply transforms into its most useful next purpose means he’ll be looking out for me and his great community of family and friends—my daughter Krista Anne attended Knox and was a student of Robin’s and we’ve all been better for his earthly guidance and I anticipate finding him there when I hope to see him most.